It’s hard to say what this will all mean in practice. Ford will get Miller’s wildly unpopular $60 per-vehicle auto tax rescinded, kick the asses of the City’s employees without much reducing their numbers, put a moratorium on the proliferation of bicycle lanes, and, most likely, make a lame-brained attempt to get rid of the street cars. He might also succeed in getting Toronto’s real estate tax killed, but only if Ontario elects a Conservative government in the next provincial election. About the only other certain achievement he’ll have will be that he’ll embarrass the crap out of the city 400 or 500 times in the next four years, and increase the number of hilarious YouTube videos featuring him putting his foot in his mouth.

But as I said a few weeks ago, this election, in the end, was about David Miller and his downtown-centric good-ideas-no-action administration, which alienated the suburbs and those on fixed-incomes, and didn’t even endear itself to the left by flubbing most of the crises that occurred—the most important of which was the garbage strike last year. Mourn that if you must, but get ready for the Dictatorship of the Goofateriat.

400 words, October 25, 2010

Predictably, there’s been a Stop-Rob-Ford movement amongst the other mayoralty candidates, but political tunnel-vision amongst the ambitious being what it is, only the one serious female candidate, Sarah Thompson, dropped out, and there’s a good chance, given the constituency splits between Rocco Rossi, former Liberal cabinet minister George Smitherman, and lefty Joe Pantalone, that Ford will get elected.

Meanwhile, the issues that have made Ford a serious candidate when he isn’t even a serious human being has barely been looked at. It involves the outgoing mayor David Miller, and both his administration of the city and his vision for it. Miller is a decent person, a social democrat, and privately, I’m told, a profoundly nice man. But he acted as if Toronto north of the 401 didn’t exist, and that it barely existed north of Eglinton Avenue. His tenure was filled with “vision plans” and “festival concepts” for different aspects of the city—nearly all downtown, on the waterfront or for getting suburbanites into the downtown—but at ground level, where people actually live their daily lives, he was woefully indecisive and ineffective. Things just didn’t get done while he was mayor, the neighbourhoods haven’t been protected, and the quality of life has deteriorated.

Among his “vision plans” that particularly grated on me was his green plan for the city, which called for a 100 percent increase in the tree canopy—while a set of moronic and costly tree-planting practices along with a water bylaw structure that made it too costly to water existing boulevard trees was visibly reducing the survival rate of the existing canopy.

Then there was the garbage collection fiasco. Several years ago the city imposed a rate-based bin system of garbage collection, a smart idea stupidly and insensitively put in place. The city brochure announcing it asked us to place our bins in our driveways on collection day, correctly positioned for mechanical pickup—a fine thing if you live in Rosedale where everyone has a driveway. But if you’re in the inner city, virtually no one has either a driveway or anyplace to put the large bins. They’ve ended up on people’s porches and in their gardens, and they’re a massive eyesore and an inconvenience.

The rules attached to pickup are even more annoying. If the bin is too heavy, the princesses who operate the garbage trucks won’t pick them up, if anything falls out of them during loading it’s left in the street, and if you have more than the bin will hold, well, tough luck. There’s more garbage being dumped in the alleys than ever before, and it’s hard to find anyone in the inner city—Miller’s constituency—that isn’t pissed about all of it. Quite simply, the use of bins in the inner city was a mistake, and should have been made optional.

But it’s Miller’s inability to control his labour component that has been his biggest failure, and I’m not just talking about wage and contract demands, which he’s buckled to again and again, most damagingly after a particularly nasty midsummer strike last summer that ended with many of the inner city parks stacked high with garbage. It’s the attitude of entitlement that has emerged throughout the city’s bureaucracy and service departments, and the feeling city staff and workers too often give you that they’re doing you a favour, not providing services that you pay for, and hey, stand back while they go for coffee or adjust their tiaras.  It’s no accident that Ford’s most popular platform plank is that he promises to kick union asses, and if he does get in, nearly everyone, including a large percentage of those who voted Miller in, will happily let Ford do what he wants to.

A surprising number of wiser heads are quietly in favour of doing nothing to prevent Ford’s election, despite his thick-headed abrasiveness. Part of it is that the other candidates aren’t providing any attractive alternatives. George Smitherman is nearly as likely to head-butt people as Ford, Rocco Rossi is a Liberal party bagman who ran adds with a Mafia theme and otherwise seems to lack discretion, and Joe Pantalone is trying to run on Miller’s way of talking about things and not doing them, and otherwise seems to have nothing going for him except looking better dressed and more suave in photo-ops than he does in real life.  These people are hoping, I think, that if Ford does get in, he’ll run out of energy and support after reigning in the unions and eradicating a few bike lanes, and that with a deadlocked council, he’ll go back to coaching his football team and yelling obscenities at Leaf’s games.  He couldn’t embarrass Toronto more than Mel Lastman did, could he?

1000 words October 5, 2010

1.

In James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer the Indians run on moccasined feet through the deciduous New England forest. They run in all the Leather Stocking Tales, they never walk, and when my father read these tales to me when I was ten I imagined the moccasins the Indians ran in were socks, stockings being a literary word for this kind of clothing. The Leather Stocking Tales reminded my father, I think, of stories about Indians he had read as a boy, written by a man named Karl May, who is known to all Germans, and whose name is pronounced by them as a single word, Karlmay. And when I was ten I thought Fennmore was a funny second name and May (pronounced My) was a funny last name.

Why do Europeans write about Indians? One reason, I imagined back then (and still do) is that they (we) are awkward men. With names like Fenimore and Karlmay, this is no surprise. Grey Owl imagined so hard that he was an Indian that he believed himself and wrote books in the voice of the Indian he believed himself to be. Everyone else believed him. I believed him. I didn’t want him to be not an Indian, and when it was revealed that his real name was Archie Belany and he was an Englishman (an awkward kind of European) who lived with beavers and had an Iroquois girlfriend named Anahareo (did she know?) and that he had a stupid name like Archie, the awkward guy from the comic books, I was depressed.

I tried to be an Indian. I practiced walking through the forest on my moccasined (leather stockinged) feet without breaking a twig and making a sound, as James Fenimore Cooper advised.  I tracked animals and people by looking for bent or broken grass blades or overturned leaves. My father read James Fenimore Cooper books to me in German and I thought at first he was a German writer: Mokassins. I had my own, real, Mokassins, the kind you could buy in those days in West’s department store in Castlegar: they had a leather thong strung through the rim and tied into a bow in front, and when I walked in them through the bush I got the not-breaking-a-twig-part down but I never managed silent running. It was hard to run through the bush in the Kootenays in B.C. where we lived in the 1950s because there weren’t many paths, and there were steep slopes and rockfalls and cliffs and the forest was often densely-packed conifers. I’d heard that the eastern woods—they call them woods out there, not bush—were more like European broadleaf forests, the kind my father knew from his childhood, so it was easier for him to imagine running through them than it was for me. James Fenimore Cooper was of course a New Englander, but I didn’t stop thinking he was German until I looked more closely one day at the book’s dust jacket (the drawing on it showed the Indian, an Iroquois,  running on leather-stockinged feet through the bush/woods/forest) and saw the title, Lederstrumpf. I couldn’t yet read German, and I asked my father to repeat what the letters said. He did, and it sounded funny. My father said Lederstrumpf meant leatherstocking, which was maybe an American word, but not one I had heard before. I realized then that the book was a translation.

2.

Karl May was a German who never left Germany and his hero is a frontiersman named Old Shatterhand who has an iron right hand which he uses as a weapon. (The trope was picked up by Stanley Kubrick in the movie Dr. Strangelove, where Peter Sellers played the Ur Nazi). His Indian sidekick is called Winnitou. He’s an Apache. Winnitou captures well the German idea about Indians: they are like the wind, der Wind, and also like breath: they rush freely through the trees, and the wind in turn rushes through their—long—frontier hair, and they join body, place, name, mind, spirit and nature, and probably a bunch more things, into a timeless, well, let’s call it a Gestalt. My father didn’t read me the Winnitou stories; the books had gotten lost after the War, when American officers took over his family home and dumped the family belongings they couldn’t use out the window, but my father talked about the stories often and said they were one of the inspirations that brought him to Canada. When he read me the Leatherstocking stories, and the Indians in them spoke German, (as Karlmay had made his Indians do in the Winnitou stories) I got annoyed. I said Indians, even though they had their own original languages, should speak English in books: Ugh, How, Kemo Sabe, shoot bad white man etc. There’s no such thing as a German-speaking Indian, I told my father.

This anecdote might explain my discomfort: Before arriving in Canada in 1952 when I was just turning six I thought English and Indian were the same language. And I thought this language was a lot like German. In Germany I had been taught to say “How,” and told it meant “hello,” Guten Tag, by my Karlmay-reading relatives, and had learned to raise my right hand, palm forward, in the signal of peace and greeting common to non-literate peoples the world over. My relatives gave me a feather headdress—this was in the last months before we emigrated, when we were seriously studying Canadian customs—and they took a photo of me wearing it and standing at attention in my grandparents’ back yard with a wooden rifle leaned against my shoulder. I look very serious in this photo because I am trying hard to be an Indian and Canadian and a potential German immigrant. Indians, I knew, look dour and serious and have hawk noses. In bed at night I practiced the words “How,” and “I come in peace,” which was another piece of—translated—Karl May vocabulary my relatives imparted to me, and the word “yes,” which I had been told was the English/ Indian word for ja and jawohl.  These, I thought, were the basic English and Indian words you needed to know when you arrived in Canada.

When I did arrive in Canada and saw my first Canadian, his name was Paul, about my age, I walked out of our house to greet him—he was playing with his toy cars in a big pile of dirt; our neighbourhood was in a new section of Edmonton—and I said “How,” “Hello,” and “Yes.” Paul stopped moving his cars around and looked at me as if I were from space.  I said “How,” and “Yes,” again, and then I said, “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” and  “I come in peace.” I was still convinced, in that magical way in which six-year-olds are certain of things, that English/Indian was one language and was indeed basically like German. You just had to add those few English/Indian words, especially “yes” into your sentence and you were away. “How. Mein Name ist Norbert. Yes yes yes yes. How. I come in peace.” And you raise your right hand. Paul continued looking at me as if I were far away, and when I kept repeating, “How,”  “Yes, yes, yes, yes,”  “I come in peace”—I speeded up the “yes” repetitions, and put a little more umph behind them, in case Canadian children didn’t hear things the same way as German kids did—he got up, grabbed his cars and trucks, and bolted. He ran (not on leather-stockinged feet) to his house screaming “Mummy, mummy, mummy.” I hear his voice clearly in memory. I hear also the many times he ran away from me screaming mummy mummy as I tried, in subsequent months, to befriend Paul. I’d learn in this process, too, the word Gemehboy, which, as opposed to Old Shatterhand, became my first English moniker, given to me by Paul—as in “Mummy, mummy, Gemehboy steal my car, Gemehboy riding my bike, Gemehboy bad!” etc.

3.

Germans and Indians have been on my mind often since those days of first contact. Once, when I was on the Queen Charlotte Islands—Haida Gwaii, off the northwest coast of B.C.—doing research on this question, I was motoring with my hosts Diane and Dull Brown between Hotspring Island and House Island on their cabin cruiser, the Hai Yu—this was in Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, which had recently (1986) been inaugurated, following Haida protests against logging by transnational corporations in this, the Haida homelands—and we encountered, out there in the chop and the rain, a green canoe in which the shapes of two bedraggled, rain-drenched young white men gradually materialized. Diane, who is Haida (so is Dull: both had been involved in the anti-logging protests) said, “They must be crazy, out here in this weather in a canoe. We better stop and see how they are doing.” We pulled over and I said, without thinking, “I bet they are German.”

And indeed they were. Dull slowed the Hai Yu way down so as not to swamp the Germans with its wake, and we pulled alongside and started talking to them. I learned that they were two kids from Heidelberg. They spoke the eager English that German students of English speak when they encounter the Anglo Saxon world, English which for them, the children or, now, the grandchildren of  Karlmay readers—and children, more recently, of the American books, magazines, movies, TV shows, pop music, that saturated the post WW II German cultural marketplace and made English the omniscient linguistic signifier—and when I spoke German to them they responded with the delight Germans always show when you speak to them in the home language in a far-away place. Diane said we better give them some food—she had already cessed out that they didn’t have any, just as they didn’t have proper rain gear—and we gave them some rock scallops and abalone I had dived for off the Hai-Yu (under Diane and Dull’s supervision); and when Diane explained and I translated to them how you “fix” these traditional food items from the land, or in this case, the sea, the Germans were beside themselves with excitement about this authentic experience in a wilderness. When they paddled away their animated chatter in my—in our—language drifted back to me in the Gwaii Haanas mist and drizzle. Dull turned to me and said, “Your kinsmen sound happy.”

Kinsmen. Happy. The words startled me. I felt suddenly awkward. Were these crazy Germans my kin? Had I, even after all these years, not succeeded in becoming “Canadian”? Do awkward Europeans have kinsmen? When we recalled the encounter later Diane said, “It’s interesting when you were speaking German: it’s like when we speak Haida. There’s two languages going on up here.” Indeed. Yes. German and Haida. Two languages. Yes yes yes yes. Howa. Gemahboy had arrived somewhere. But where?  I fancied for a moment—and more often later in my stay in Haida Gwaii—that Diane and her family might have a soft spot for us Germans. It stemmed perhaps from our eager, naïve, even goofy way of speaking when we are in foreign places and experience first hand what we have read about in books; it stems from our greenhorn enthusiasm when we encounter our Idea of Nature and Eingeborenheit (that’s Aboriginality) in Real Life. We Germans, I thought, can be childlike when we are face-to-face with the Other, whether natural or human; this might be (when you’re German you start with a theory) because we historically had minimal experience of colonial face-to-face contact with the non-European world. We’ve got lots of stories and books; no history, though. We have Geschichte: stories; tales.

Our naive inventiveness has its dark side, of course. My friend Liliane from Egypt told me once the Germans’ mistake was that they—we—tried, in two wars, to colonize Europe, rather than the rest of the world. And I imagine the Haidas, like everyone else, balk at the German propensity to devise ontologies, worldviews, Anschauungs, Gestalts, Zeitgeists, etc., from the tiniest threads of factual evidence. But I did feel, at times—often—in Haida Gwaii that I was being hosted as a different kind of European invader than would a first-language English-speaking Anglo-Canadian. I had “two languages going on up here,” and I had, as do the Haida, God bless or curse me, yes, kin.

4.

The imaginary Indian is a trope in Euro-North American literary culture. Daniel Francis has written an excellent book by that name on the subject, and Anthony Wilden, in a quirky essay, extended the idea into his concept of The Imaginary Canadian. I’m happy, I discover, as a (German)-Canadian, that I live in a partly imaginary country (it’s sometimes described as “post-modern” or “in the process of becoming”).  It reminds me of home, Germany–which, from its very beginnings as Holy Roman Empire through to its implosion as Third Reich, has been an imaginary construct. I worked with Diane Brown on a writing and recording project which was to be a collaborative book on the relationship between imagination, language and place: the book part of the project bogged down, but our work became a CBC Radio Ideas program called “Walking-Around-Eating”—named after one of  Diane’s father Watson Pryce’s uncles, and given to us by Watson to use for our program—and I learned, in the making of it, that speaking, eating and paddling (and motoring in a cabin cruiser) can be related concepts, and that the act of naming someone—and also something, a place, say–works differently in Haida Gwaii than it does in the European parts of  Canada.  Being here is differently valenced, and you are in another, er, Weltanschauung. At its core is the idea of kin.

Some Europeans have been given names by Indians and in this way satisfied their yearning to acquire local worldview and authenticity. They acquire kin via this name. I played in—awkward—moments with the fantasy of this happening to me in Haida Gwaii, but—well, Norbert, got over it. I was also, most certainly, not “adopted into a tribe” as some white authors claim to have been, in this way dealing with the problem (popular at the time: late eighties) of “voice appropriation”—which accrued when white guys wrote about Indians. I did not imagine myself, even for a moment, certainly not with someone like Diane around, to be Haida, even of a faux variety.  No, the curious thing that happened in Haida Gwaii was that I became more German, more German than I was in my home city, Vancouver. I was clearly a visitor, but I had a home country. I was like Haidas in this way. I had language, culture, place, and I had, God help me again, kin. As did the people here.

5.

The above account is only partially true. I was given a name by Diane and her relatives, but it was an English, not a Haida name. The name had to do with a large black bear I encountered and swore at when he charged and chased me away from his/my pink salmon fishing hole on Pallant Creek on South Moresby Island, Gwaii Haanas, and I felt myself turning, as I ran away, anything but silently, on gumbooted, not leatherstockinged feet, breaking all the rules about how to comport yourself when charged by a black bear (you’re supposed to stay and “fight back”) into food. Luckily the swearing worked, or more probably the pinks, which the bear was free to fish for once I was shooed out of the way, were tastier fare than was the body of a German, and when I returned to Skidegate, Diane’s and her family’s village, and told the story and everyone laughed—that’s when I got my name, my Haida/English/German/Canadian/Immigrant name. Call me “Swears-At-Bears.”

Language, kin, irony. Cross-cultural mirth. What’s in a name? I had a friend in Vancouver who had a classic, upper-class hyphenated English name, and with this friend I had long debates about the relationships between race, color, speech, ethnicity and identity. He said that he, a “brown man” (his mother is South Asian, but the family’s from Britain) suffered, by definition, as a “person of colour,” more at the hands of Canadian racism, than did I, a white man with, albeit, a funny name and a dark national history. I said with a name like his and an accent like his (he talks Upper Canada College English) he could rule the world or at least its waves. He said, Yeah, so long as I’m on the phone: when I walk physically into the room the conversation stops. I said, When people see me and I’m silent, everything’s fine, but when people hear my name, and then ask me to spell that name, then declare it “unusual,” and then look at me in the manner Paul back in Edmonton pioneered, my stomach churns. I want to swear.  I admitted that this had happened more in my youth in the B.C. Interior, where my parents insisted I wear indestructible Lederhosen—you get the picture: Lederstrumpf; Lederhosen?–to school than it did today in the city, but I recalled that just recently a person had made me repeat my name three times and after I did so still addressed me as “Norman.” When, in our final conversation, my friend called me a typical arrogant German, kraut, white man, eurocentrist, etc. and I could not bring myself to call him a Limey, Tommy, Pom, let alone a dumb brown Hindu, I walked away, and our friendship seemed to collapse. I felt ashamed, lost, frightened.  He called after me that he had been goading me in jest, that I couldn’t take a joke, handle irony—the absence of a sense of humour being a typically German trait.

In Haida Gwaii, yes, I learned that name calling, a fundamental way of imagining the Other, goes differently there than it does in Old Europe and its teenaged colonies, and to try to illustrate this I’ll follow the above sad story with a—hopefully—funny one. I lived in Haida Gwaii with Diane’s father, Watson Pryce, who was an elder of the Eagle Clan and hereditary chief of Chaatl, a (now abandoned) Haida town on the West Coast of the Charlottes, out on Buck Channel, on Chaatl Island. Watson told me one day about a man he had worked with on the dozer boats for MacMillan-Bloedel, the major logging company from the sixties through to the eighties in the Charlottes. The dozer boats sort the logs in a boom and their noisy unmufflered engines made Watson partially deaf.  He referred to this man as “one of them down east Indians,” and when he spoke this phrase I burst out laughing. My first thought was, he’s speaking about one of my former friend’s—kinsmen. In Castlegar B.C., “East Indians” were those Indians who were from India, and who you learned about in school but never saw (no “East Indians” lived in the Kootenays in those days)  and you differentiated them from “our,” ie. Canadian Indians (of whom none lived in Castlegar anymore either—the teachers didn’t tell us where they had gone).  I thought next that Watson might also mean an “Indian” from eastern Canada, an Algonquin or a Huron or an Iroquois, Anahareo’s kinsmen, about whom we also learned in school, and who lived in what we called The East (where they ran around on leather stockinged feet). Or he could mean a Cree, or Ojibway, or a Blackfoot from the Prairies, this region being still down east as far as B.C.ers are concerned. My final, funny, thought in this sequence was that the Down East Indian was a White Man, an Ottawa DIA bureaucrat, say, who had come to try to live in a real place (“on the ground,” as the  media expresses the idea these days) rather than an office cubicle, and who, because he did everything haywire, turned into an Indian.

I didn’t ask Watson which kind of Indian he meant. In Haida Gwaii you respect elders and don’t ask questions. (You do this in Germany, too, but not always for the same reasons). Nor did I want to display my ignorance about what everybody else around here knew a down east Indian to be (and thereby of course, in due process, becoming one). Watson used the word “Indian” in many ways: there was an “Indian boat” (one that leaked and miraculously stayed afloat), there was an “Indian net” (one whose mesh had big holes but still netted a lot of fish, but let a lot get away, also, so they could spawn) and there was an “Indian suitcase,” which is a plastic garbage bag into which you stuff your clothes when you get on the plane to go off  Island, fly “down south” to Vancouver. Diane only used this last form of the word; in all other contexts she said, “we,” or, “people here,” or “people around here,” or “Haidas.”

6.

The word “tribalism,” which I’ll link up here with the idea of kin (anthropologists  Marshall Sahlins and Levis Strauss say kinship is the structural base of all tribal social arrangements) was being bandied about a lot when I was in my twenties and we were reading Marshall McLuhan, and it was reprised in the nineteen eighties and early nineties when the “Jihad versus McWorld” conversation was moving around the globe that had become a village.  The word was used in “New Age” spiritualist circles to denote the desire for “connection,” “ unity” “oneness,”  “om,” etc., (Gemeinschaft rather than Gesellschaft !) something approximating, people hoped, the experience of kinship in a consumerist world. It is still used in its dark sense to label the mindless religious fundamentalisms that are making an anti-consumerism comeback in formerly colonized Middle Eastern locations. The word was—and is—also used, by both Germans and non Germans, in a negative way, to label the enthusiasm, the spirit, the Geist, that fueled the nationalist/racist fervour with which Germans in the Thirties flocked to the Blut und Boden, blood and soil, philosophy espoused by the Nazi movement. The Pied Piper dreams and behaviours attendant upon all three branchiations of the term hark back, in turn then, to the Romantic movement in both England and Germany, where poets like Novalis, Tieck, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron experienced, in “nature,” a kind of religious unity and authenticity that Eighteenth Century rationalism had expelled from culture. This impulse finds its nineteenth century popular (some say Kitsch) cultural zenith, then, in the writings of, well, authors like Karl May, James Fennimore Cooper, and, let’s not fear to say it, Canada’s Grey Owl, who carried the flame into the 20^th century.

When Dull and Diane and I (my daughter, a kin, then seven, was with us also) met the Germans in the green canoe, such big historical thoughts, too, bobbed up and down in my mind out there in the chop. They were trying to explain my feelings of awkwardness on the one hand, desire for kinship on the other. Germans, when they meet in foreign climes, are, even as they are happy to see each other, also wary of each other. They play a hide and seek game. This has to do with the specific awkwardness that the German branch of the European branch of humanity got itself into. I’m talking about the black hole in history that Germany’s Nazi Pied Piper dream made manifest, and the shame and guilt it produced in the immediate post war generations. Germans often go abroad, even emigrate, in order to escape this shame/guilt complex. A stain.  Germans can be found, as people often remark, in the most distant corners of the earth, vis in green canoes here in Haida Gwaii. This results in part from the false, perhaps kitschy, in any event tricky romantic streak that led them to first follow and later try to escape the push and pull of the Nazi Pied Piper tune—to whose lyrics they or their parents did not pay proper attention. When Dull called the young Germans my kin, I winced: I was proud, and then ashamed: in which sense, I asked myself, is he using this word? In the good, holistic, “authentic,” tribal sense, or in the mindless (and evil-minded) sense in which Germans, Hitler’s “willing executioners,” Gemehboys, Krauts, Nazis, et al are easily stigmatized? I was proud to have kin, to be like the Haidas in that way; I was also afraid of having such kin, of being—not Haida, but Hun, way out there in the historical darkness, and right here, in a home and a native land.

I’m noting now, as I write this, that when I said, “I bet they are German” upon sighting my kinsmen—it turned out someone, a Haida, had lent them the green canoe when they arrived, all eager to explore South Moresby, and had not realized there were no roads there—I was slagging them in a way not dissimilar to my former down east Indian friend’s easy way of talking about stupid Germans. When Germans are found in the remotest corners of the exotic, post-colonial world it is “fun”—if you act Canadian, as I was attempting to do, by way of a localizing performance for Diane and Dull—to declare them crazy, obsessed, naïve, even stupid in this seemingly mild mannered, poke-in-the-ribs kind of way. It is also insulting. The boys in the canoe were a generation younger than me, less guilt-ridden, shame-infested, fearful, potentially passive-aggressive than we, the immediate post-war babies, are. They were genuinely enthusiastic about being where they were, and about meeting us, about meeting one of their “kin” out here in the world of the Indianer, a possibly truer world than the one at home, and certainly a world of adventure, not shame or guilt. In slagging them, I unwittingly slagged myself. Fear of “blood and belonging” drove me, as did deep desire to belong, even—let’s not go too far with this metaphor, but let’s go some distance—to taste blood: you eat your food fresh, often raw, in Haida Gwaii. Sometimes the blood’s still dripping. “You look your food in the eye,” goes the local saying.

7.

After my last conversation with my former friend I developed (being German) a theory. The theory was that the Germans, because they “started” two World Wars, invented Naziism, perpetrated the Holocaust, etc. are perhaps the last people on earth whom one can, with impunity, slag. It is not politically incorrect to label and make fun of Germans, nor does one generally pay a price for doing so. After all, they (we) did perpetrate the Holocaust, opened the black hole of European history. They (we) were willing executioners. (Were we?) We’re the benchmark, says my theory, for twentieth century Evil, perhaps for all Evil, Evil’s very definition. I recall to mind HannahArendt’s and Karl Jasper’s letter debate on this point. My theory is self-serving, of course, as most theories are and it doesn’t hold for long, but it does, at times, as they say in the media, have legs. It explains my former friend’s confidence that he could name/label me with impunity, and it explains my silent (lack of) response. And it explains my easy, secret, fear-and-desire-driven slur against my compatriots way up North there in Haida Gwaii.  My friend’s words had their intended effect, which was to rob me of a place from which to speak.  My quip about my kinsmen was an effort to rob them—and unwittingly myself—of dignity. I was back there in Edmonton playing Paul and Gemehboy. Playing Kraut, Nazi, Hitler or–Rhubarb, by the way, was my nickname in Castlegar: another sour vegetable.

8.

My German grandmother, a most influential kin, used to say Einmal Deutsch, immer Deutsch. Once a German, always a German. She meant this in a positive, not pejorative sense. She wasn’t a Nazi (as far as I know) and she said wars were made by men who were fools and wanted to control the world, which was something one couldn’t do. When I lived with her in 1965 she sang me a song from her early twentieth-century elementary school days called Der Kaiser ist ein Guter Mann: The Kaiser is a Good Man, and she said she yearned for those times when one had rulers who one could trust and there was order rather than madness in the world. My grandmother grew up in a smallish town where you spoke your local dialect at home and with each other, and you spoke high German to your teachers and to your priests. She didn’t travel further than a couple of hundred kilometers from that town until she flew to visit us in Vancouver in 1961. She learned one English phrase while there: Shöt ze dowa, shut the door, which was spoken to my younger sister’s friend Heather who came over and left the back door open, a habit which my grandmother, who lived without central heating for most of her life (and with no heating at all in the immediate post-war years) could not comprehend. My grandmother learned Heather’s name, which she pronounced Hedeh, and which sounded, when she said it, like Hede, the name of her daughter, my mother’s younger sister. My grandmother was convinced until the end of her life that my parents’ decision to emigrate to Canada had been the biggest mistake of their lives, that my father would have had a better career as a doctor if he had stayed in Germany, and that my parents would never have divorced (like Americans) if they had stayed in their own country and not started speaking so much English. She thought Indians were people who lived in books (or maybe in India) and that men who read too many of these books deserved whatever misfortune befell them.

When I think about Germans and Indians now I sometimes think about this: I know a man who lives in Princeton B.C. (I began writing this essay there/here) and who was a German prisoner of war in Russia from 1945 until 1948. He was forcibly inducted into the Nazi war machine right out of high school in 1944 and sent to the Russian front. The Russians captured him one year later, forty kilometers from Zwickau, his home town in Saxony, the point to which their invasion had by then advanced, and he was transported to a prisoner-of-war camp four hundred kilometers east of Moscow, in Siberia. He will not tell me about life in the camp, albeit, he does give one account—of how they, the prisoners, all teenage boys, were so hungry that to survive they told each other stories about food. Fantastic stories about three and four course meals, lavish feasts, were accounted and recounted in detail, food item by food item. Then, when the stories got out of hand, and the vacuums in their bellies reminded the boys of where they were, they sometimes had to jump on the story-teller and forcibly silence him because if he went on they would have to kill him for telling a story that had not an iota of potential truth.

My friend told me some things about the return trip from Siberia: they put the teenage prisoners in boxcars along with some cattle and they dropped them at the Polish border where they were allowed to wash. Then the boys were put on a Polish train—you know that the track gauge changes at the Polish border, my friend explained—and this took them to the German border. Posen was the city where they re-entered Germany. When he got back home my friend went to university and became an engineer, escaped via Berlin, just before the wall came up (1961), from East to West Germany, and he traveled the world managing construction projects for an American company. South America, Africa, Southeast Asia: he’d been everywhere. Then one day on a train between Germany and France he met a woman from Princeton B.C. who was “doing Europe” and the two fell in love. They were both well into middle age and had lost previous spouses. They could hardly speak to each other—she had her own European background, having been born of Slovakian parents who came to British Columbia’s Tulameen Valley early on in the twentieth century to coal mine—but she spoke no German or much Slovakian, and he spoke no English. They found other ways to communicate.

My friend, I’ll call him Rudy, came for a visit and decided he liked the country and he stayed and married the woman from Princeton, call her Mary. Rudy told me the country around Princeton, lodgepole and ponderosa pine, some spruce, a few hemlock, some aspen and birch, among outcroppings of shale and granite on rolling mountains, was a lot like the country around the prisoner of war camp in Siberia. It reminded him of that place, which had been quite beautiful, would have been, if they hadn’t been so hungry. We were driving through this country in his Jeep Explorer headed toward Link Lake to go ice fishing when he told me this, and I looked more closely out the passenger window at the flora and the topography than I so far had. On the CD, Rudy was playing a disc by a German popular singer, a kind of crooner, who sang Heimat Lieder, homeland songs, to an orchestral accompaniment. The genre was familiar to me: I knew some of the songs because my father had sung them (to guitar, not orchestral accompaniment) when we lived in Castlegar, a couple of major mountain ranges to the east, and I could even sing along with some of them. I found the music schlocky: the schmaltzy accompaniment and the performative vocalizations did the songs no favours; but in the context of Rudy’s story, and of the way he looked at me occasionally after he had told it, to see how I had listened, to him, and now to his music, gave me a strong feeling. Even a true feeling. I was in one of truth’s possible presences. We were home in a cozy cruiser with the heat on, it was fifteen, maybe twenty below outside, and the conifers and aspens that whipped by reminded me of my first glimpses of the Canadian boreal forest when my mother and my sister and I rode on the CPR through the woods of Northern Ontario in March 1952 in the first week of our immigration. When Rudy and I arrived at the lake we walked out on the ice, Rudy found a spot and shoveled the snow away, took out the auger and showed me how to bore the hole. The ice was about six inches thick. He baited the hook with a kernel of corn (how do Canadian trout know corn, from southwest America, is interesting winter food?)  and we dropped it down and put the short rod in the holder. We waited for the bites.

Rudy speaks a kind of English which in our family was disparagingly called “Gerlish.” Sometimes known also as “Kanädisch, it is a mixture of English and Germanisms, German and Englishisms, and it rings true in an odd and hilarious true sort of way when one knows both languages:  Die Kuh ist über die Fence gejumpt und hat den Kebbitsch gedemmitsch, my father would say, imitating not the Katzenjammer Kids but one of his German-Canadian patients.  Det iss goot seenery hier, ne? is how Rudy uses this vernacular: Vee mussen now de korn on ze Hook, machen. Pass auf. Det ice iss not so sick over ser ass hear. You know? he says. And…Hello, hello, yes, yes, how, I come in peace. Yes yes yes yes yes, Norbert says, bobbing his head up and down like an immigrant FOB. I answer Rudy in full “high” German, mostly, afraid to slip into the possible madness of two lenkwiches mixen zugeser or zwei lenkwiches mixen toozamen, and becoming Gemehboy. (Paul, I found out much later, was actually Ukrainian: we lived in a part of Edmonton where “there were a lot of them,” as my father put it.) When we talk for a longer time, Rudy gradually slides over into fuller German, and I hear then, and love then, the rolling and drilling Saxon dialect intonations—Mundart, mouth manner, as this speech mode is called in German—of his home province.

When Rudy and Mary are together and Rudy speaks Gerlish/Kanädisch, she listens and answers him in pure B.C. Canadian English. She says—when I ask her—that she understands “most” of what he says and can guess the rest. When I am there she sometimes asks me for direct translations of specific words or phrases, and when I give them to her she nods her head and says that’s what she thought; or she laughs and says I always thought _____ meant _____. Rudy laughs, too. They both said (Mary passed away, of cancer, shortly after I wrote the first draft of this essay) language between them had never been a problem; their marriage had other foundations.

9.

Out on the Siberian ice of Link Lake (I want to call it Mary Lake) I see Rudy, in mid distance, standing beside the ice fishing hole. He’s got his black Siberian felt cap on, with the ear flaps pulled down, and he’s packed up in a thick black down parka that amplifies his already considerable seventy-three-year-old girth. (He jokes that he’s catching up for what he lost in Siberia.) He’s wearing black felt-lined snowmobiler boots and pants, and mitts that he takes off only to bait his hook.  At this distance, with his arms packed into the jacket sleeves and angled away from his body, he looks like a strange German-Siberian-Canadian-Saxon-Inukshuk. He’s pretty snug there, I think to myself—I, the “assimilated” English speaker, and resolute “high German,” speaker whose feet are freezing because I’m here from Vancouver and not properly geared for local conditions. Don’t know from winter gear. When we get back into the Jeep and the heater blasts on, I start to relax. Fee get no fisch, det iss too bet, Rudi says, becuss dem traut iss goot eating—and then he puts a crooner on the CD player again. This time it’s, Freddie, ein Seeman, a seaman, who sings about Die Gitarre und das Meer, his guitar and the sea, and about Hamburg, the city he left and occasionally—not  too seriously, not seriously enough to want, in the actual moment of singing, to act on what he is singing about—yearns to  return to.

Dees Freddy songs, und dee ossos off dem, says Rudy after a while, dem songs are how vie survive in det kemp. We zing dem zen. I zing zem zen. I ask if he still sings them and he says, No not now. Jesst lissen. As I sit and attempt to hear and name where we are—we are in the Similkameen watershed, driving through the Hayes Creek drainage, in the Undivided Metamorphic Rock Terrain of British Columbia—I listen to Freddy, and I start, despite myself, to hum along with the orchestral accompaniment. Then, from somewhere, almost nowhere, the name “Pablo Neruda” arpeggios into my brain. Yes, here’s another literary changeling, a name bender, a EuroAmerican, albeit not an immigrant, not first generation, but still a man with a funny name—his real name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes—whose poetry, whose namings of things, made him a giant of international verse. Did his original name sound funny in Chile? Or does “Pablo Neruda” sound funnier? His famous adage, “He who eschews sentimentality walks into ice” slides down from an Andean precipice and fills in the terrain here on Hayes Creek.

10.

Some fun, mixed with astonishment, is made these days in the Canadian media of the German “Indian Clubs,” Indianerklubs, which flourish all over the old east and west, and now reunified Ossie/Wessie Germany. Here every-day small businessmen, teachers, workers, civil servants, shop keepers, craftsmen, spend their weekends going into “the bush” (the German Wald—forest—which is meticulously manicured and kept by the local Förster, and is often just a farmer’s field) and dressing up and acting like Indians. They put on war paint, they sing and do the dances, they build teepees, they construct stone age weapons, and their replicas of traditional “Indian” (mostly Plains/Prairie Indian) artifactual culture are meticulous and exact. These men are serious fellows.  They have studied the literature, including Karl May (who is making a big comeback not only in Germany, but all over Europe, and even Asia—not England, though) but also the anthropological and travel literature. They know how to pow wow. They will tell you exactly and show you in detail how to make a tomahawk, light a fire with flint or two sticks, sew a buckskin bead shirt, erect a teepee, create an eagle feather headdress, weave wampum or perform a chant. “Real” Indians from Canada come over there and are invited to these club outings, and they, the real Indians, marvel at the accuracy of the replicated artifacts and ceremonies. Even the songs, they say, are accurate. Only the dances are a little bit, well, wooden—awkward. When the German Indians aren’t correcting, in true German fashion, the real Indians for their sometimes false knowledge about their traditions, the real Indians giggle. They come back and report on their visits in funny/serious CBC radio documentaries.

And in the New Yorker (or was it Vanity Fair?) I read that there are ceremonies, held in upstate New York or Arizona or the Florida Everglades, in which American CEOs, Washington lobbyists, high-level bureaucrats, corporate lawyers, go to wilderness camps and play wild men. These “corporate retreats,” orchestrated to encourage “team building,” involve quite cruel rituals: the guys from the top floor offices cut themselves, brand themselves, bury each other up to the neck and stay there overnight, tie each other to trees and throw knives and shoot arrows at each other, and spend hours hurling verbal insults. This is teambuilding Yankee-style, and the retreats (from what?) are understood, said the Vanity Fair or New Yorker article, to be soul-building for each team member.

11.

The Haida do in fact say How–or rather Howa. They say it when they greet each other, and when they say goodbye to each other. I deduced, after hearing it in various contexts, that it might mean “we are Haida.” Sometimes they briefly raise and wave with their right hand while saying the word.

7141 words  May 26, 2010

Not this year. The only Caribbean country most people can remember the name of is Haiti, and nobody is thinking straight about that (as illustrated here ). Meanwhile, a horde of local politicians are butting up at the smoke pump in preparation for a run at becoming Toronto’s next mayor, and the city is filled with posturing federal MPs with nothing to do but strut their righteousness indignation over Stephen Harper’s proroguing of Parliament. The Premier, Dalton McGuinty, announced a $7 billion deal with Samsung that is supposed to put us on the front lines of green power production, seemingly not having noticed that every other country in the U.N. with a GNP greater than $7 billion has a similar deal in place, and every single-issue activist in Ward 19, where my cousin Luigi lives, is thinking of running for city council now that veteran Joe Pantalone has unwisely vacated his seat to run for Mayor.

In the middle of this, there’s been an outbreak of pedestrian squashings in the city—14 people dead so far, and television news crews homing in on every new pedestrian/auto interface in the hope that they can get a scoop on the next addition to the total. Meanwhile, every nitwit in the city has both a theory about the cause and a program proposal to stop the carnage: everything from banning pedestrian use of I-phones to banning jaywalking to tethering the elderly to their walkers. The silly season has arrived seven months early.

The silliest of the sillies, as far as I can see, is the lineup for the next Toronto mayor. The current front runner is said to be George Smitherperson, the joint candidate for the Gay community and the Hells Angels. Smitherperson is widely believed to have once been one of Dalton McGuinty’s cabinet intimates, whatever that means. If he wins, he’ll be the first openly gay mayor of a major Canadian city since Winnipeg’s Glen Murray, who just happens to be running for Smitherperson’s vacated legislative seat, no doubt wanting to become intimate with Dalton, too.

A few years ago I met Smitherperson in, ah, person. I saw this skin-headed guy skating around the arena where I was teaching my niece to skate, trying to pick up, I guess, votes. At one point, he boarded me, and introduced himself. “Hi,” he said. “I’m George Smitherman.”  “Good for you,” I said. “You any relation to Steve Smitherman, the guy who plays for the Cincinnati Reds?”

Smitherperson’s main opponent seems to be Rocco Rossi, the former national director of the Liberal Party of Canada, a post at which he taught Michael Ignatieff how to stick his thumbs up, appear to be constructed entirely out of spruce, to grimace awkwardly whenever a camera is present, and to stay on message even when no coherent message exists. Rossi’s other claim to fame was as John Tory’s campaign director for Tory’s failed 2003 municipal election. Given his campaign platform, which is to sell off the profitable city-owned electrical utility, Toronto Hydro; to kick municipal staff whenever possible, and to save the city $13,000 by cutting his own salary 10 percent, one wonders if it was his suggestion that John Tory campaign as Provincial Conservative leader in the last Provincial election on a platform of making private school tuition tax deductible.

To Rossi’s right, is George “Giorgi” Mammoliti, who has the support of his mother and the remaining four members of Markham’s lately-amalgamated Beer and Porn Institute and Rob Ford fan clubs. Mammoliti wants to put all the hookers into a ghetto so his friends will know how to find them, legalize gambling, and give the Toronto Transit Commission assets to the corporate sector.

On the left side of the political slate is, well, leftists fighting amongst themselves and shooting themselves in the foot. First, veteran Ward 19 councillor Joe Pantalone declared his candidacy, thus giving voters on the left side of the spectrum at least some alternative to Smitherperson. Now, there’s post-teen Adam Giambrone from Ward 18, who was an up-and-coming councillor before his tenure as Chair of the Toronto Transit Commission slue-footed him into a cascade of public relations disasters. Giambroni then uploaded an embarrassing dance-and-make-a-fool-of-yourself video onto YouTube, then declared that he wants to be mayor, too, thus ensuring that the city will be deprived of two left-of-centre councillors, and that Smitherperson will be the next mayor of Toronto.

I suppose one has to write off this piece of classic left-wing self-immolation as the product of some sort Council hallway pissing match between Pantalone and the wet-behind-the-ears Giambrone, but Christ, isn’t there someone in the NDP with enough clout to read the riot act to these guys?  Pantalone is an experienced councillor with a decent track record. He should have the left behind him to take his shot at the job that turned David Miller into an anorexic, while Giambroni is a kid who ought to be biding his time for a couple of terms while he builds his constituency and can walk into the Council chambers without a towel over his shoulders.

The outcome as it now stands is going to be Mel Lastman with a mean streak and better gay pride parade funding for the next few years. What else poor Toronto will get, I shudder to think about.

February 1, 2010 950 words

When I took a job as the editor in chief of the weekly newspaper in Chetwynd, B.C., the last thing that I expected to trip me up was my spelling. Aside from my willingness to work in a two stoplight town three hours north of Prince George whose primary exports are coal, lumber, and brawling NHL middleweights, it was one of the things that got me the job. I was born and raised in Vancouver, and until October of last year was enjoying a perfectly cosmopolitan life in downtown Toronto, working as an intern for a major magazine and spending my late twenties in the same condition as most of my friends, a kind of existential stasis defined primarily by the relentless pursuit of cocktails and cool brunch spots.

But the thundering approach of my thirties told me that it was time to get some “real-world” experience, whatever that meant, and so I found myself packing the 1994 Honda Accord my father had generously decided to give me and heading west to Chetwynd. I spent many of my driving hours during the four days it took to cover the 3,000 kilometres between the intersection of Bloor and Bathurst streets and “downtown” Chetwynd thinking about ways in which I might screw up upon my arrival and receive a fist to the face, or worse, for my stupidity. Yet aside from mildly offending the wife of the town’s resident Elvis impersonator by mistakenly thinking that her husband’s self-professed passion was an ironic gesture – I had yet to discover that there’s no such thing as intentional irony up here – I haven’t made any terrible cultural miscalculations in my eight months here. None, at least, that have warranted the aforementioned fist to the face, a commonly used form of feedback in this town and others across Northern B.C.

I have, perhaps even more miraculously, avoided making any major journalistic blunders, a significant accomplishment for somebody who lacks any formal training in capital-J journalism. While I mistakenly assumed that my voice recorder was on in a few situations where it was not, asked a few stupid questions to people who didn’t deserve to have to answer then, and ran some conspicuously mediocre photographs in my first few weeks on the job – to be fair, I’d never had an interest in taking pictures before, much less ones that would go anywhere beyond my facebook profile - I haven’t, to my knowledge, made any errors of practice that couldn’t be described as normal parts of the learning curve. No, my biggest mistakes up here have involved my spelling, one of the few strengths that I thought I had brought to the job. Spelling is something of a lost art these days, of course, thanks to the proliferation of spell-check programs. But I’ve discovered that, at least in Chetwynd, they’ve found a way to defeat these programs.

There are no obvious spellings of first names in Chetwynd, and this is a lesson I have had to learn many, many times over, with predictably angry phone calls or emails from parents upset that I’ve misspelled their child’s name in the town’s only newspaper. Up here, something easy like “Tyler” becomes “Tylar,” and “Jordan” becomes “Jourdon.” Better yet, “Jeremy” becomes “Jermey,” and “Jesse” becomes “Jescey.” These creative spellings aren’t limited to kids, either, meaning that this is no generationally-locatable trend. Among older residents, there’s a Daun, a Suczan, and a Tannia, to name but a few. Chetwynd residents are a predictably conservative bunch, but when it comes to filling out a birth certificate they have a long tradition of transforming into convention-busting radicals.

I am, to be clear, not trying to mock these creative spellings. Upon closer inspection, they have a kind of curious logic to them. In a place like Toronto or Vancouver such apparently deliberate misspellings would produce a relentless campaign of playground teasing for the child and quite possibly a visit from child protective services for the parents. But places like Chetwynd don’t have the cultural diversity of a Vancouver or a Toronto – or even a Prince George – and so creative spellings are a pragmatic way of avoiding the kind of confusion that would be the inevitable result of a class that had seven Tylers, four Jeremys, three Ashleys, and six Jordans, all spelled exactly the same way. More importantly, given the limited pool of family names inherent to any small and geographically isolated community, it circumvents the impossible situation of having two or three children in the same class with the exact same name, first and last. In the Vancouvers and Torontos of the country, multiculturalism is a defining part of everyone’s daily lives, whether they like it or not. In Chetwynd, such opportunities, from an inter-cultural relationship down to something as simple as a steaming bowl of Pho at lunch, simply don’t exist. In their absence, the creative spelling of first names is about as close as they can get to it.

I have, in the weeks and months since I discovered this facet of Chetwynd life, managed to avoid making too many mistakes with first names. I check the spelling every time, even if I presume to know how it should go, and on those few occasions that I forget I am reminded that the naming culture in which I grew up and the unwritten rules associated with it doesn’t exist here. As far as important lessons for a young journalists go, it’s been an interesting and instructive one.

Chetwynd, June 11 – 910 w.

Under balmy skies, and amid blossoming chestnut trees and lilac bushes, the German capital has been embroiled in a bitter debate about education, theology, and civic values that was only settled in a citywide referendum last Sunday, April 26.

It was strange to see every lamppost along every major thoroughfare festooned with competing signs urging such abstruse thoughts as “Vote yes, because free choice is my ethics,” or “Vote no, ethics lessons for everyone,” or the always suspicious invocation of “For the sake of our children.” Strangers were scratching their heads, in need of some background information about this debate in a city that features such philosophical traffic intersections as Kant Strasse and Leibniz Strasse, and is known as “the atheist capital of Europe,” given that less than forty per cent of the multicultural population claims any religious affiliation.

It all began three years ago in the wake of an “honour killing”  murder of a young Turkish woman by her brother because he objected to her Western lifestyle. That’s when the city government, a leftist coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Left Party, headed by Mayor Klaus Wowereit, decided to introduce a required ethics course into the school curriculum for all students in the 7th grade and above.

Previously, the city’s schools offered voluntary religious instruction classes (known as “reli”), with Catholics, Muslims and Protestants taught separately. In other parts of Germany, religious studies are compulsory, but in Berlin they were optional and attendance was declining. Civic leaders decided that whether or not some students attended “reli,” all students should have a course that examined society’s shared social values in the name of integrating school age children from a variety of ethnic and faith backgrounds. The idea was that such teaching would discourage atrocities such as “honour killings” and buttress the values that hold a secular, especially multicultural, society together. Religion classes would still be available on a voluntary basis, although it was likely attendance would decline even further.

That’s what worried the people who coalesced into what became known as the “Pro-Reli” side. A coalition of Catholics,  Muslims, Jews, and some Protestants joined forces with conservative political parties and leaders (including German chancellor Angela Merkel, who heads the country’s Christian Democratic-SPD coalition government), and launched a successful, well-financed bid to hold a civic referendum on the subject.

The “Pro-Reli” side proposed that instead of required ethics classes, students (and their parents) should be “free to choose” between reli and ethics. Pro-Ethics supporters argued that casting the issue as one of “free choice” was deceptive, designed to mask an attempt to strengthen religious teaching in the schools. German novelist and jurist Bernhard Schlink, author of The Reader, whose film version was an Oscar-contender last year, bluntly called the “free choice” claims “a campaign of lies.” The Pro-Ethics opponents of the referendum, for their part, made the case that there should be “ethics lessons for everyone,” but that the schools would continue to support “both religion and ethics.” The large Turkish community of Berlin was divided between Pro-Reli Muslims and more secular minded members.

Given that Pro-Reli had seized the “free choice” high ground (who could be against free choice?); had enlisted the support of church officials, prominent politicians and even well-known entertainers (one popular TV game show host weighed in on behalf of faith-based education); and were outspending and out-postering their secular opponents by a margin of at least three to one, the Pro-Ethics side had cause to worry. Public opinion polling showed an almost even split on the referendum question.

But the campaign for a tolerant, secular society had two things going for it in addition to intellectuals like Schlink: the referendum requirements and the famous civic attitude that is described by some local wags as a combination of “BerlinDifference/BerlIndifference.” The hurdles for passing a referendum are high enough to discourage political frivolity. In addition to gathering a sizeable number of petition signatures to put a referendum on the ballot, the pro-side has to not only win the referendum but to secure the support of at least 25 per cent of the city’s eligible 2.45 million voters. So, a referendum can fail if it’s outright defeated or it can fail if it doesn’t get enough people out to support it. Held on a sunny 23 degree spring Sunday when much of the population was wandering in the woods, sailing on the lakes, or locked in traffic on the autobahns, the Pro-Reli side had not only to overcome the “Berlin difference” (non-religious, secular attitudes), but also “Berlin indifference.”

And the envelope, please: the “pro-religion” referendum was soundly defeated on both counts. Amen. It lost the straight-up vote, 51.5 per cent to 48.5 per cent. And it lost the referendum requirement battle, since only 29 per cent of voters participated, and Pro-Reli garnered a mere 14 per cent of eligible Berlin voters, far short of the required 25 per cent. Voters split largely along geographic lines: while the Pro-Reli side picked up most of its votes from the part of the city that was formerly West Berlin, voters in the former East Berlin went heavily against the referendum.

When it was over, disappointed Pro-Reli leaders consoled themselves by declaring that they had at least sparked an important public discussion. Mayor Wowereit, a fierce opponent of the referendum, was dismissive: “This shows that those in ‘Pro-Reli’ who were portraying this as a ‘freedom’ issue — as if the Russians were about to invade — are out of touch with the real situation in Berlin.” Given the current gloomy recession, high unemployment in the region, and a burgeoning civic debt, “Vovie,” as he’s locally known, probably had a point about reality.

The longer-term argument about what’s real and what’s divine will play out in classrooms across the city over a number of years. There are a couple of reflections that might be gleaned from the referendum debate. One is that Berlin, which prides itself on being a “city of tolerance,” is something of a leading-edge experiment in cultural integration in Germany. A once largely ethnically homogenous population of over 80 million people has in recent decades became far more variegated. In addition to a Turkish community of more than 2 million people, the country, and especially Berlin, has taken in immigrants from all parts of a far more mobile European Union since 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. Not only has there been a sizeable influx of different faiths, particularly Muslims, but of different national cultures, especially from the former Eastern European countries, Russia and Asia. So, cultural integration in Berlin and parts of the rest of Germany is not just an abstract issue (a matter that Canadian readers can easily appreciate).

Further, there’s the broader question of what to teach young people. Germany comes to such problems with the advantage of being a famously “serious” culture, able to address fundamental (and fundamentalist) topics without embarrassment. It also suffers less from the widespread decline of reading than, say, cultures in North America. Finally, it’s the European country that has most had to come to terms with its historical past and, interestingly, it’s done so, in part thanks to writers like Schlink, and its most famous living philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, who has argued on behalf of a democratic public space for several decades. So, Berlin schools at least have a chance to develop an ethics curriculum that might actually work, though its effectiveness won’t be known for some time. It probably won’t heal the wounds of the world, but it might increase the possibility of civility.

In  the meantime, the seasons continue, and as one scriptural book famously noted, there’s a time for referendum voting and there’s a time for waking up to the birds and the bees.

Ah, springtime! It’s when a young man’s or woman’s thoughts turn to love — and in Berlin, also to musings about the twilight of the Gods and secular philosophy. Only in Deutschland, the home of philosophers Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Habermas — and don’t forget Nietszche, who declared the death of divinity.

.

Berlin, Apr. 27, 2009.

It might be time for Toronto’s urban geographers and city planners to add the term un-gentrification to their lexicon, because that’s precisely what’s happening in the Annex, one of their city’s oldest and most famous neighbourhoods. Unlike other neighbourhoods in the city that are being bought out and up by neo-yuppies, who spark the transformation of old carpet stores and empty storefronts into painfully hip clothing boutiques, espresso bars, and of-the-moment restaurants, the Annex is sliding in the other direction. Where the neighbourhood was once a bohemian haven defined by a decidedly middle-class ethic it now is rapidly becoming nothing more than an upscale student ghetto defined by fast-food restaurants, ten dollar martinis, a dwindling clutch of futon stores, and a startling increase in the number of vacant storefronts and the homeless people that populate them.

One of the most important and visible aspects of the gentrification process is the influx of new and interesting restaurants that in turn attract more people to the neighbourhood and more fuel to the fires of gentrification. It stands to reason that the reverse is also true, and that the disappearance of interesting restaurants portends trouble ahead for a given neighbourhood. That’s precisely what has happened over the past five years in the Annex, as the diverse selection of quality restaurants that served something other than sushi and shawarmas have been replaced by places pursuing the aforementioned culinary zeitgeist or downmarket chains aimed at cash-starved students like Pizzaiolo and St. Louis BBQ. Meanwhile, the supply of quality delicatessens, bakeries, and speciality suppliers, necessary adjuncts to a prosperous local food culture, have all disappeared.

Another important factor in and indicator of the process of gentrification is a vibrant nightlife built around interesting and eclectic bars that draw in young people from other neighbourhoods, and here again the Annex exhibits the opposite trend. In better days, the neighbourhood’s evening trade was anchored around Lee’s Palace, a venerable old music hall that hosted some of Canada’s best live music performances. Nearby bars like the Tap and Las Iguanas, which were jointly managed and staffed by former members of the early 90s band Pursuit of Happiness, attracted a healthy mix of musicians, artists, and locals, while the Green Room was popular among underage kids from across the city who were looking for their first drink. Today, in contrast, the nexus of the Annex’s after-hours scene is located in the bowels of the Brunswick House, a place that attracts crowds of professional pukers, UFC aficionados, and other people that normally head to the club district. The only thing they have added to the neighbourhood is an increase in late night fist-fights, noise disturbances, and property damage.

As if these trends aren’t discouraging enough, those interested in the long term health of the Annex must now also respond to the death of both its heart and soul. Dooney’s Cafe, the long-time haunt for writers, artists, and other assorted political and cultural rabble-rousers that acted as the neighbourhood’s soul, was sold recently. Ownership of the famous cafe, which successfully fended off the predatory gaze of Starbucks in 1995 in one of the neighbourhood’s seminal moments, passed from the steady hands of Graziano Marchese to those of Marnie Goldlust, a twenty-something with little experience in the business and even less in the neighbourhood and its unique politics. Its devoted core of regulars, which included people like Globe and Mail columnist Rick Salutin, writer David Gilmore, jazz impresario Bill King, and actor Tony Nardi, has already abandoned the place for more hospitable climes, most of which are situated outside the Annex entirely.

The neighbourhood’s heart, meanwhile, is slated for transplant surgery. Honest Ed’s, that infamous insult to good taste that anchors the neighbourhood for tourists and locals alike, is widely expected to meet the business end of a wrecking ball sometime in the near future, as David Mirvish converts it and significant parts of neighbouring Mirvish Village into a lucrative mega-condominium project. While the finished project and the upwardly mobile tenants that will populate its units may help to stop the de-gentrification of the Annex by providing local merchants with an influx of new residents with disposable incomes to burn, it could just as easily accelerate the process by replacing a glittering monument to the neighbourhood’s quirky eclecticism with another cold and sterile condominium block.

Un-gentrification shouldn’t be confused with de-gentrification, a concept best described by writer Adam Sternbergh in a November 2007 piece in New York Magazine on the New York borough of Red Hook. In it, he describes how Red Hook failed to take off as the latest it-neighbourhood despite the fact that it was subject to the attentions of New York’s real-estate developers, artists, professional hipsters, and other members of the vanguard of gentrification. It was, as Sternberg noted, a realtor’s dream, “boasting Manhattan views, a salty maritime history (working piers! Brawling sailors!), and a brochure-ready name, all of which would play perfectly on some theoretical condo prospectus. Seeking waterfront living with a dusting of urban grit? Then drop your anchor in Red Hook!” The fact that Red Hook has yet to exchange its bars and diners for flower boutiques and it-fashion stores left Sternbergh wondering whether gentrification was the raging and unstoppable fire that its proponents depicted it as or instead a flood that raises all ships but eventually, and indeed inexorably, puts them right back, and in so doing leaves behind a badly damaged version of the original landscape. The Annex, however, is a unique case, and as such doesn’t co-operate with Sternbergh’s analysis. Far from being a neighbourhood awaiting the arrival of gentrification, be it with anticipation, nervousness, loathing, or some combination thereof, the Annex is one whose cycle is already complete. It is un-gentrifying, a phenomenon that may merit its own feature article one day.

The recent shootout that left two wounded at the corner of Bloor and Brunswick Streets, the geographical heart of the Annex, should have served as a bloody reminder of the Annex’s decline, or even a catalyst for discussion about it. Instead, it elicited no more than the usual isn’t-that-terrifying and aren’t-guns-terrible titterings that inevitably accompany the rubbernecking spectators and the police tape at shootings. That nobody seems to have noticed the broader trend that produced the shooting is a consequence of its comparatively glacial pace. While previously no-go neighbourhoods like south Ossington or West Queen West appear to gentrify in a matter of months, the Annex’s decline has been much more gradual. But that difference in pace makes it all the more dangerous and all the more difficult to reverse. The people affected by it, from local residents and business owners to the ever-shifting landscape of public officials and politicians, have been lulled by the gentle grade of the decline into believing that the long-vacant storefronts, corporate fast-food outlets, habituated homeless population, and pools of blood and broken glass that should be viewed as warning signs are instead perceived as longstanding characteristics of the neighbourhood and elements of its charm. Unfortunately for those who care about the neighbourhood, it appears that nothing, not even the shooting of innocent bystanders on a popular street corner, is capable of exposing this dangerous deceit.

Toronto, July 28^th – 1218 w.

I’ve begun to suspect that Toronto’s mayor, David Miller, who just a couple of years ago appeared to be presenting a new kind of civic politics to the city, has a fair amount of clay inside his shoes, and is more bluster and bullshit than anything of substance. But until very recently I’ve found it hard to track the source of the trails he’s been leaving, and harder to determine if what we’re seeing is political slime or just mud from the longstanding mess that is Toronto politics. Either might source out at Miller, but it might also be senior government downloading, the city’s deeply-flawed charter after Mike Harris’ forced amalgamation, or the many intractable dim bulbs on his council. But now the City of Toronto’s recycling program, which is keyed by a Miller-inspired policy target of getting 70 percent of the garbage “diverted” to recycling, seems to lead straight to the real source. And that source, unfortunately, is David Miller.

Miller’s increasingly apparent fatal flaw, it seems to me, is that he talks a big and great game, but then doesn’t play it very well, if at all. His heart, which once seemed large and inclusive, still looks to be in the right place on most issues, even if it shows an alarming preference for the downtown grandstand. But when the time for the practical applications arrives, nothing much seems to happen on his watch—or what does happen is demoralizingly inapt.

Not long ago, for instance, Miller’s unofficial Department of Good Intentions came out with a tree policy for Metropolitan Toronto that proposed upping the urban tree canopy from 17 to 30 percent. This is typical of the kinds of notions that 21^st century urbanism specializes in—ones that have a peculiarly distant sort of practicality and predictably high-flying abstraction mixed together. Toronto’s urban trees, everyone to the left of Neanderthal agrees, are the lungs of the city, transforming CO2 into oxygen and pulling pollutants out of the air and soil so we can breathe more easily and healthfully. Upping the tree canopy, ergo, is the cheapest available answer to air and ground-water runoff pollution, and pretty well every other ill this side of the Taliban. The City of Toronto policy document trumpets the asset value of a single mature tree at a whopping $130k, part of which supposedly accrues to the public, but some of which comes from reducing summer air-conditioning costs for homeowners and/or enhancing house prices when its time to sell. We just have to convince everyone to plant trees in their front yards, and we’ll be urban problem-solvers, rich ones to boot. The City just needs to do its part by planting trees along all the commercial streets, and wham/bam it’s Urban Forests Uber Alles.

And sure enough, the City of Toronto has had enabling programs up and running for years. Any homeowner in the city can have a city crew come out and plant a tree in their front yard, free of charge, and it’s a fairly common sight to see a city crew installing trees along our commercial streets.

But it’s right here where things fall apart in David Miller’s Toronto. Right around the time the city started ramping up its tree planting offer, it also began installing water meters in residential neighbourhoods in order to replace the flat fee people used to pay for city water with pay-per-use. Now, all those wasteful people who like to hose off their sidewalks every morning or wash their cars are going to pay for the privilege.

As far as I can see the wastrels haven’t stopped washing their cars or hosing off the sidewalks, but judging from the increased number of dead and dying trees in the downtown neighbourhoods, they’ve stopped watering their trees, which, during a hot summer, can need 450 gallons a day. Admittedly, a seven year drought has lowered ground water to dangerously low levels, but the disconnect between the tree policy and the practical means of sustaining the policy is an equal contributor to the dead and dying trees. Yet Miller’s policy people haven’t responded, not even to promulgate a tree-care advisory or to propose a water-rate reduction to homeowners who’ve put a tree in their yard, let alone drafting and then adopting a tree bylaw that supports the canopy-increase goal in a meaningful way.

A tree-care advisory, incidentally, is something that the city needs even more urgently for its commercial boulevard trees, which are often planted in ludricrously inadequate containers and/or without protection from winter salt, and in both cases without any legal requirement that the businesses they adorn water them during the summer months. I’d imagine that the cost of planting a commercial boulevard tree runs somewhere between $2000 and $5000 by the time the installation crew pensions and Timbits are paid for, and that there’s no difference in cost between a planting and a replanting. These days, we’re mostly seeing replantings because the inadequate planting standards and zero maintenance has the 5 year mortality rate somewhere above 50%.

Getting the tree planting programs to work properly isn’t impossible. It would require some innovative lateral thinking by city hall staff, and some bureaucratic heads would probably have to be cracked together—or sent rolling. But it’s right here where David Miller characteristically fails to deliver. He doesn’t seem to have the will to get anything he was elected to get done implemented or working right. In this instance, he’s satisfied, seemingly, with having a “nice” policy for the trees even though it’s clear to anyone with an IQ higher than a chimpanzee’s that in 10 years we’re going to be closer to 10 percent tree cover than the 30 percent the nice policy asks for.

Perhaps more revealing of where David Miller’s regime does its heavy lifting lies in the changes it plans to make to get our recycling program to the 70 percent diversion point Miller wants in 2010. The key issues in recycling are, it seems to me, of two sorts. One is getting everyone to recycle instead of just single-family dwellers and non-messy corporations, and the other is getting the recycling materials it does collect actually recycled.

Most of the recycling done in Toronto is done either by commercial businesses—the larger the better since effective compliance seems directly tied to economies-of-scale—and by single family residents, the more upper middle class the better. The screwups are the small businesses, who flush whatever pollutant recyclables they can (or dump them on public property or the business next door), and apartment dwellers, for whom separating recycling from garbage is a pain in the ass that is easy to avoid or pass on to the apartment owners, who aren’t exactly famous for their collective civic spirit when it gets in the way of profit-taking. The other screwup area is that a depressing percentage of the recyclables the City does pick up eventually ends up in landfill anyway, sometimes because of collection contamination but more often because of poor market understanding by the city—and again—that not-so-subtle lack of determination. Basically, when recycling something becomes too hard, they just dump it in the garbage and cart it off to Michigan.

So what does David Miller’s regime do to address all this? It imposes hulking collector-convenient bins on those who already recycle, and a pay-by-volume policy on the non-recyclables. Never mind that the oversized recycling and garbage bins will be convenient solely to the city garbage pickup crews that will now be able to load everything onto the trucks without soiling their pinkies or risking their backs, and will be a huge inconvenience to downtown homeowners without sideyards or spacious storage areas. The spring 2008 “Waste Watch” circular that was sent out in early March informs us that the each homeowner will be restricted to filling only the new blue bins, and then provides some ridiculously stringent regulations for placing the bins so the automated equipment can pick them up without the crews needing to wrangle them or otherwise risk their nail-polish.

If these regulations are taken seriously, they’ll necessitate the removal of most of the boulevard trees in the downtown neighbourhoods just to get the automated bin-loading equipment working efficiently, and will probably need the construction of little tiny driveways for the bins at each residence—never mind the eyesores we’ll have when most of the downtown bins are stored in people’s front yards. This is silly enough by itself, but the pricing-by-volume system for garbage and the instruction that we should save our “overflow recycling for the next collection, or ask neighbours if they have extra room in their Blue Bin” is just plain stupid. If you want citizens to recycle more, you make it more convenient for them to do it. What’s happened instead, as far as I can is, is that all the energy and money is spent on making recycling easy for the gang of civil servant princesses who pick up the recycling.

What Miller’s program is also inviting, in the real world where most people have to live, is mass public dumping of both recycling and garbage. That’s because a sizeable percentage of fiscally-restrained Torontonians are going to buy the smallest bin they can and dump their excess on their neighbours—or on the boulevards and in the back alleys and parks. These are all things that David Miller, who used to represent Parkdale, which is a downtown neighbourhood, should have picked up on. He didn’t, maybe because he’s not a fine-detail guy, but more likely because he’s got his eye on grandstanding policy issues that involve embarrassing the Federal and Provincial governments and not the cultural subtleties of Toronto’s landscape and citizens. And maybe he’s just become a broad-brush leader who enjoys the backrooms and banquet halls too much, along with the illusions of grandeur and order that urban planning so often serves up—and so rarely delivers on.

What’s equally revealing is that the recycling program appears to have been created solely to make the jobs of the collection crews less physically arduous, even when that goal runs counter to the more important issues of compliance, productivity and practical reality. One gets the sense that the nitwits who created the program (and then wrote the circular) live in some nice suburban neighbourhood with driveways, spacious sideyards and surveillance cameras to catch dumpers. They’re likely high-income self-celebrating urban professionals who don’t even know you’re supposed to get along with their neighbours, don’t have neighbours who live in high-rise apartments or detached housing, and so don’t have the kind of street-level common sense people without driveways and surveillance cameras tend to practice out of necessity.

One also gets the sense that David Miller is a man who’s listening to his professional staff, not to the people who elected him. At one point a few years ago I believed that David Miller’s loyalties were at least partially to this kind of Torontonian, who’ve always been treated like second class citizens by whatever regime held power in this city. Now I’m reduced to trying to figure out if Miller’s markers are held by fast-talking urbanists like Richard Florida or those well-intentioned but joyless middle class busybodies bent on refitting the world to suit the Workers Compensation Board and other like-minded social democrats who’ve given up on a just or free world and just want everyone to be safe from the hazards they fear are bearing down on them.

All of this is depressing enough, but perhaps more important than the emotions it evokes is that it makes one begin to examine under a harsher light other things one previously took for granted. It’s made me look at the energies that make today’s Toronto go, and what I see isn’t uplifting.

Toronto, like any great city, has its governing “spirit” that can be tested in the day-to-day behaviors of its civic apparatus. I’m not talking about the stupid boosterism of Mel Lastman’s moose of a few years back, which I’ve come to like to the precise degree that they’ve ceased to be public tourism icons and become reflections of individual civil irreverence. A city’s civic “spirit” is much more subtle, even if it is no less metaphoric than those moose. It’s about how we see and treat one another, and where, in both the streets and in private imagination, that takes expression. In Miller’s Toronto, that spirit is exemplified, it seems to me, by three things.

One is the abject reluctance—or inability—of the regime to protect the city’s unique downtown neighbourhoods from the onslaught of retail monoculture. In the two neighbourhoods I know best, the Annex around Bloor and Bathurst, and Little Italy on College, the decline is highly visible and is accelerating. The Annex neighbourhood has recently seen much of its particularity obliterated by franchise outlets that could be found anywhere in North America, while College has been transformed into a restaurant and bar zone for drunken suburbanites and, as Toronto Life recently had it, ought to be renamed “Entertainment District North”.

The second elements of the spirit of Miller’s Toronto are less overtly destructive but no less pernicious in the long term. They are his quota-driven parking enforcement officers, a lazy and officious group that thinks nothing of cherry-picking public schools while parents are dropping off and picking up their kids or ticketing sticker-holders who can’t park legally because outsiders are parking in the legal spots all day without being tagged. Since these hardlining jackasses are the public officials most downtowners find themselves nose-to-nose with more frequently than any others, they’re creating a miasma of incivility in the relations between City and citizens that is far more confrontational and rancorous than it needs—or is wise—to be.

The third element of Miller Toronto’s spirit might be the most demoralizing. It’s the continued and progressively more aggressive presence of panhandlers and squeegee brandishers (calling them “kids” is like calling barracudas “fishies’) on the streets, along with the growing and utterly unpoliced density of graffiti cover. These are, each in their own way, unpleasant side-effects of the Triumph of Capitalism: the impoverishment of the poor and disaffected in the first two instances, and the retribalization that is the rarely acknowledged dark side of working class-level multiculturalism in the third.

They’re unpleasant phenomena, yes, but they’re not unsolvable, as New York City and many European jurisdictions have spectacularly demonstrated. Yet David Miller’s Toronto has studiously avoided dealing with any of them. It’s as if his nominal social democratic values have devolved to protecting the right to beg, bullyrag and vandalize. Together with the uncivil parking enforcement officers, they’ve made Toronto’s streets uglier, nastier, and—worst of the three—more mean-spirited than they need to be.

Added together with the tree program and the recycling mess, it’s enough to make anyone look for a new mayor. And that’s a shame.

.

Toronto, Apr. 29, 2008

]]> http://www.dooneyscafe.com/archives/550/feed 0 http://www.dooneyscafe.com/archives/496 http://www.dooneyscafe.com/archives/496#comments Tue, 06 Mar 2007 10:56:19 +0000 Brian Fawcett Brian Fawcett has wandered down the street again, and offers a darkened sense of how the Bloor Street area where Dooney Cafe sits is evolving. And at Costco, he solves a local mystery. ]]> It’s now March, and until a couple of snowstorms hit us, one on Valentines Day and the second at the end of February, Toronto’s winter was extraordinarily late and once upon us, half-hearted. That it came at all was a relief, and at first, it was widely welcomed. After almost a month of eerily pleasant and too-warm temperatures along with a lightscape that felt like Toronto was auditioning to be the set for a remake of Neville Shute’s end-o’-the Worlder On the Beach, no one complained about the cold for almost a week. After that we’ve been subjected to more than five weeks of below zero temperatures, and an older, more familiar anxiety has returned: is winter ever going to end?

The fact is, winter’s reluctance to arrive scared the hellout of people here, just as the surge in wacky weather has scared people elsewhere across the world. This is to the good, because no one can sensibly deny the reality of global warming anymore. It is shared experience now, and not deniable even by the Bush Administration or Canada’s Conservative government, which is currently afluff with a series of insincere attempts to convince the public that conservatives no longer think that caring about what we’re doing to the planet is the first step toward both Communism and bum-buggering erotic proclivities.

I’m not convinced that the Conservatives are acting in good faith, but then I’m not convinced by any Canadian political party’s sincerity about the environment, except maybe by the Greens. Stephane Dion notwithstanding, the federal Liberals did nothing for the environment over their 12 years in office, unless you think that signing the Kyoto Accord and then doing absolutely nothing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is competent environmentalism. NDP leader Jack Layton likes to pretend his poop is bright green, but his party has a longstanding habit of standing up four-square for the environment exactly until the first union job is threatened—after which they’re not much more caring than the old Soviets were. Social democrats and socialists of whatever degree of radicality don’t make good environmentalists because their humanism doesn’t, when the crunch comes, permit them to see beyond humanism’s political repertoire. They remember how women have their reproductive rights, and then they mistake ethnic and religious lunacies for human rights, and pretty soon they’re four square behind standing room only. In the end, today’s social democrats just want to ensure that the (now imaginary) working class has exclusive access to the pastures of paradise, that the chosen have an acceptable multicultural profile, and that there are wheelchair ramps for the disabled—even if it’s standing room only.

All this being the case, why aren’t I out campaigning for the Green Party? Don’t get me started. Greens will protect the environment, sure, but is having the Waffen SS reconstituted in green uniforms the best way to get that protection? The social conservatism of the Greens, both in Europe and North America, is a constant reminder that it was Germany’s environmentalists who first allied themselves with the Nazis, and that it is politically unwise to put one’s trust in anyone who believes in purity or purification. I don’t  want to suggest that Canada’s Granolaheads are goose-stepping Nazis under those floppy sweaters, but from Elizabeth May on down, they provide a little too much evidence that they think they know better than the rest of us. Sure, they’re mostly finger-pointing school-marmish about it, but I worry about anyone whose political energy is grounded in self-loathing. When I talk to Greens, I get the sense that they’re thinking, at a subconscious level, geez, if we could just get rid of all these goddamned humans, the planet would be much better off. Hello?

Greens are, in that sense, practically everything the NDP isn’t, and thus a different terroritory of the same dysfunctional wheel. And that—along with the fact that the wheel isn’t on the same vehicle as the capitalist economy no one is any longer willing to interrogate—is the problem, isn’t it? Greens have more misanthropic righteousness than political patience and where the NDP’s core values ultimately contradict their environmental goals, the weakest commitment the Greens have is to democracy and due process.

It’s not much brighter at the local level. Despite David Miller and the recent infusion of talent on council after the last election, the City of Toronto also seems similarly ill-constructed to bite down on the things within its jurisdiction that could make a difference to the environment, and has a disturbing willingness to settle for “good intentions”. Partly it’s party politics that has been preventing anything from really getting done—the party dogs are more interested in beating up their ideological enemies than getting anything done, and anyway, dogs aren’t exactly famous for innovative thinking. But there’s also an institutional stupidity that seemed to get built into the 1997 amalgamation of Greater Toronto’s municipalities, and the presence of an overabundant herd of bureaucrats shadowing their jobs and their departmental turf in an era of bottom-line accounting is probably a major culprit.

It’s the sort of mindset that sets up a blue-box program and then sends 80 percent of it to landfill because it can’t think its way past the high cost of sorting the materials. Nor can it seem to come up with a way to make high rise apartment dwellers take recycling seriously, and the attempts to get the restaurants on board have been more authoritarian than effective. You want another example of what I’m getting at? Okay, look at this one: the City’s ostensibly enlightened revenue-producing conservation program of metering water is likely to result, given the decade of moderate-to-severe drought we’ve recently experienced, in the destruction of much of the city’s tree cover.

Why? Well, metering water will make everyone cost-conscious of water use. You tell me what’s going to happen when citizens wander out to water the boulevard trees, some of which need 400 gallons a day during hot weather. Never mind. I’ll tell you: they’re either not going to do it, or if they do, they’re not going to give the trees the water they need. Deputy mayor Joe Pantalone, who used to be the city’s tree advocate and still likes to talk about how the boulevard trees are the city’s lungs, doesn’t seem to have noticed that the city has two policies nose to nose. The obvious solution to this one—not a foolproof one at all—is to give homeowners with city-planted trees on their property a $50 annual break on their water bill and let them know that they have a civic duty to water the trees. If we want more trees and an income-neutral policy, they could put a $50 surcharge on homeowners without boulevard trees. Don’t hold your breath for this one to happen.

You’d also think Mayor David Miller would be willing to have the fireside chat necessary to get the troop of princesses who ride the recycling trucks to empty the green bins without bribes or begging (they’re prone to decide that full bins are awfully heavy and can wait until next week).

More generally, the recycling trucks need to go out of their way to make recycling noticeably easier for people than punching everything into drawstring plastic and sending it to Michigan with the non-recyclable recyclables.

* * *

Just before Christmas I made one of my periodic runs to Costco Wholesale. No, I don’t have a Costco membership, but Graziano Marchese, who got me into going to Costco in the first place, gave me one of his Dooney’s cards so he could collect the 2 percent on whatever I spend. I used to worry that the cashier was going to look at the card and notice that I don’t exactly resemble the round-faced, swarthy person on it, but the reality is that no one looks at anyone’s face at Costco because the corporation only has an interest in our consumer disorientation and our wallets. I generally don’t look at people’s faces there either, at least partly because I’m vaguely ashamed to be there, although of course I always make sure whatever I’m buying is only available at Loblaws or Staples—until I spot a real bargain, after which point I’m no different than any other crazed idiot in the store.

Maybe it was the holiday season and Peace-On-Earth, etc., but I did glance around at the faces about me while I was standing in the checkout lineup. The third face I parsed belonged to the cashier on the checkout next to the one I was in. I found myself gazing at Julia, the woman who, as noted in the last neighbourhood report I did here, abruptly abandoned the Elizabeth Delicatessen on Bloor Street two years ago and was rumoured to be living in Ohio.

The rumours were wrong, evidently. And the reality, as it tends to be when people face economic difficulties, was notably less romantic. Our eyes met for a split second, and she quickly looked away. Likely she didn’t want the contact with someone from her past life, which would have involved a barrage of questions about what happened and why. Or maybe she was just following the corporation’s no-eye-contact code. I won’t draw the moral/cultural diagram on this, because it’s painfully obvious. But now you know what happens to struggling business people, even ones that are highly valued and popular.

Zizi, which along with the also-recently-closed Via Oliveto, was for a few years in the early 1990s, a relatively serious restaurant on the north side of the West Annex Bloor strip, is now closed and boarded up. So is Tre Fontane, which never had one fountain let alone three (isn’t it supposed to be “Three Coins in a Fountain”?). Tre Fontane’s owner was a strange but friendly character who sometimes wandered into Dooney’s to scratch his head about why Graz’s customers ate at Dooney’s and not at his place. A lot of people who don’t know Graz wonder about the same thing.

Superior Photo is now 10,000 Villages, which is a franchise that offers fair trade coffee and a variety of higher-quality-than-usual Third World merchandise. If you’re really cynical, 10,000 Villages is the latest marketing scheme to get us to pay more for Third World commodities by making us feel guilty about how exploitive capitalism is. I’m all for Fair Trade in whichever form it takes, even if all it means is “slightly-more-fair-than-it used to be.” But if you look carefully at what’s on offer at 10K Villages, most of it still lies in that netherworld between bric-a-brac and useless junk. The difference is that here there are a few items for sale—night-tables and bookcases, mostly—that have both utility and some beauty. These are also lustily over-priced, which leads me to the perhaps cynical conclusion that whoever thought up this franchise isn’t getting to work on the bus, and doesn’t spend all his/her cash and quality time with Juan Valdez and his people any more than Sam down at Wal-Mart does.

The owners of Cobs bakery, which opened in the fall on the north side of the strip, aren’t going to be found on public transit, either, at least not on the TTC. That’s because Cobs is a virus, too, and a new and virulent type that attacks an element of the local economy that was once thought to be immune. What Cobs does is premix and prepack its breads and other bakery goods, probably in some vast industrial complex in Ohio, and then bakes them on-site using automated ovens, minimum-wage workers and an idiot-proof operating manual. Customers get their bread fresh, sort of, and forget that the profits are being sucked out of the local economy as surely as they are at Costco.

It’s hard to say what HMV Books, which is now open on the south side of Bloor west of Brunswick Street, really represents, either generally or to the neighbourhood. For fairly obvious reasons, John Snider andFranz Donker at Book City aren’t fans, and I’ve heard stories from others thatdepict HMV as the book industry’s equivalent of an ambulance chaser—able to thrive because most of the industry’s producers pretty much live in ambulances. If nothing else, HMV is a weirdly apt metaphor for the way today’s world works: A slick new corporate-style entity built on a fading cultural component with a collapsing industrial apparatus that is now into its third decade of creating products that progressively fewer people want and even fewer still use (there is a distinction). Without chronic overproduction of books, HMV couldn’t exist. In a sense, it is the institutionalization of Giant Book Sale ^TM, which has been feeding off the same cultural shift for at least 20 years now, but which was based on the assumption that overproduction was a temporary condition. HMV embodies the recognition that this isn’t a temporary condition, and thus can be exploited on a long-term basis. Another possibility is that HMV is just a very large second hand bookstore, and that we should all be grateful and partake. Only time will tell—but in the meantime, ain’t capitalism grand?

The strip west of Bathurst continues its curious transformation. It is curious because it is part decline and part ethnic reorientation. A quarter century ago, this was the Hungarian district. In the early 90s, with the Euro population in decline, Latinos and Koreans began to move in. Today the Koreans are firmly in control, and most of the Latinos have migrated further west along Bloor. Whatever is Korean-owned along the street tends to bustle in a distinctly Korean and insular way, and the critical mass is beginning to move east across Bathurst Street. But the Koreans don’t own everything, and what they haven’t taken over is in a marked state of decline.

The McDonalds outlet, with the parent company still reeling from the Supersize Me documentary’s disclosure that Ronald McDonald serves food that is more likely to kill you than to nourish you, is now a Korean restaurant, and judging from the empty seats, not a particularly good one. Further west, Tasty’s, which used to be a neighbourhood institution, has also closed down. The Greeks who once ran it sold it to some really quite talented folks connected with Southern Accent, which is the long-running Cajun restaurant on Markham. They messed with the meat&potatoes menu just enough to alienate the old clientele without enticing new loyalists, and down it went.

Also gone is the personable John Angel of Angel Interiors, which was really a quite fabulous family-run upholstery shop a few doors down from the Korean Supermarket just west of Bloor and Manning. He’s moved his operation to Christie & St. Claire, and seems to be doing fine up there.

On the surface, it may seem strange that none of the crappy sushi joints on the strip have died. This may be more a testimony to how undemanding downtown Toronto’s Japanese cuisine customers are than to the general vitality of the sushi craze, but perhaps there’s another explanation.

The reality is that none of the sushi joints on Bloor are Japanese restaurants. The ones west of Bathurst are established Korean restaurants that serve sushi, and the ones that have appeared east of Bathurst in the last five to seven years are global franchises run by Koreans or Chinese. And in some respects, they’re the most visible edge of a fundamental change in the entire neighbourhood.

Over the last decade local business after local business has gone down, and more than half of them have been replaced by virus of one sort or another. Subway has arrived, so has Starbucks and Taco Bell. Ronald McDonald has come and gone, carried off by its reliance on transfat and calories. A host of lessor viruse has also taken root—the sushi francises, the Friendly Greek (which came, burned down and was replaced by an always deserted Thai Springrolls franchise. There’s also the Pump, Cobs, and god knows what else I haven’t spotted or don’t realize is a virus. But they’ve crept onto the street, and now there’s more of them than the local businesses.

The result is that the strip has become a fast foods locus, and the other food provenance has also declined: five delicatessens are now two, and the number of full service restaurants has similarly dwindled. A few days ago, Graz told me glumly that the last two years have been his worst since he opened, and he doesn’t see it improving.

College Street, which is my other hangout, has also seen some changes. Around Christmas, Magnolia Foods reopened after four months, presumably with a less onerous rental lease. The new proprietors are South Asian, nice people who are, as they point out, friendlier than the old proprietors. Unfortunately they’re also clueless that they’re operating in a neighbourhood that remains distinctly Southern European, which means you need to know what’s good olive oil and what isn’t, and which tomatoes are which. Before it went down, Magnolia was trying to develop an upscale version of the local groceries that were once common along the street, but now completely gone. Until the high rent began to break them, the original proprietors had a notion of how to do that. They were pushed over the edge, I suspect, by the demolition of the office building across the street a block east, which supplied takeout lunch clientele and a solid portion of their other trade. The new people don’t seem sure whether they’re an upscale convenience store or a gourmet delicatessen, and it shows. That they seem not to know the difference between olive oil and crankcase oil probably dooms them–or ought to.

A few doors west, Marlowe has closed, and a chicken wing franchise called Duffs—a famous one, according to the board-up sign—is on the way. Marlowe was one of those restaurants that couldn’t quite decide if it was a bar or a restaurant, and ended up as neither. When the liquor inspectors closed it for 9 days after a New Year’s raid that caught it (along with the
doomed Teatro and Octapus (their spelling) Lounge across from the soon-to-open Europa condo) serving booze to smokers outdoors on New Year’s Eve, it never quite seemed able to recover. The Europa is another story. The construction barricades around it have been removed, and the building is filled all day with contractors as it moves, like an iceberg, toward occupancy. It is a building of some elegance, but its ground floor retail remains mysterious, and what effect the infusion of its occupants will have on the neighbourhood more so.

Further west on the south side of the street the bars and restaurants open and close without much fanfare or local interest. But even so, the Italian and Portugeuse women’s and childrens clothing stores that have been there for decades blink out one after another. This is a serious loss of texture for the street, because the goods these shops sold were of high
quality–imported from Italy, which is, after all, Giorgio Armani’s native land. The several contemporary clothing retailers that have bravely opened on the street have mostly met the
same fate, including the badly-named Gigolo’s, which was run by a extremely bright and personable 30-something Portugeuse woman my daughter got along with famously and who I used to buy clothes from when she had a small shop on Bloor just west of Bathurst. I don’t know if she gave up because of poor profitability or because the ongoing fight she was having with her boy-friend/business partner went terminal. What I do know is that the shop predictably outlasted her by only a month or so.

Still further west on the north side of the street past the rows of dollar stores a Sub shop is opening below the strangely mezzanined corner building with a one room second floor hair-dressing salon that looks like it escaped from the set of Moonstruck. And of course, there as elsewhere the restaurants come and go like phantoms, mostly killed off by unreasonable ground rents, chefs who can’t cook, and owners who party with their noses.

Winter isn’t kind to either Bloor or College Street, but then winter doesn’t make a beauty of any part of Toronto save Rosedale, and the ravines that run northwest to southeast throughout the city. The good news—and that’s a commodity we haven’t seen much of this winter since Adam Vaughan got elected to City Hall and became too busy to hang out, is that winter’s end is just around the corner.

March 6, 2007: 3500 words.

What I expected was pretty much what happened: a 48-hour minor political wonder, sandwiched in between the early-December selection of Stephane Dion as the new leader of the Liberal Party and the full tide of Xmas shopping. Equally predictable was a smattering of mainstream media stories about the gay marriage issue almost entirely devoted to speculation about the tactical maneuverings of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the new leader of the opposition, Monsieur Dion, followed by the inevitable slide into collective amnesia.

Apart from members of parliament, about the only voice permitted by the media to comment on the matter was that of the pustulant moralist, Charles McVety, president of the Canada Family Action Coalition, who assured the press that his side wasn’t going to abandon the fight against gay marriage. “We are going to continue to lobby members of Parliament, to raise up grassroots and to engage in the democratic process,” McVety declared in a garbled bit of rhetoric, but one felt that his presence on the tube was merely designed to satisfy the media’s leaning-Tower-of-Pisa notion of journalistic “balance.”

Harper’s strategy

Before getting to what should happen in a society not afflicted by instant forgetfulness, let’s dispense with the micro-politics. The media angle on the issue was the discovery of a paradox: it was “A vote Harper doesn’t want to win,” as a Globe and Mail analysis (Dec. 7, 2006) by Ottawa Bureau Chief Brian Laghi was headlined. Why would an anti-gay marriage government sponsor a motion against gay marriage if it didn’t want to win? There are two reasons.

The first is that Harper had promised not only the public but especially the “social conservative” members of his party that the issue would be debated in parliament if he became head of government. It was a promise he made on the first day of the campaign that brought him to power. Fulfilling the promise, Harper was proving that he is a politician who doesn’t renege on promises, a point he was happy to make to the general electorate. As well, formally raising the issue, even if there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the vote, would demonstrate to an important sector of his supporters that he had not forgotten the issues by which they had “brung him to the dance.” As it happened, most right-wing members of the Conservative Party were not all that happy with Harper’s fulfillment of the promise. What they wanted was not a debate in this parliament, but for Harper to wait until after the next election when, they presumed, he would have a majority that could actually reverse the law on same-sex marriage and much else. Hence, the grumpiness of people like McVety.

The second reason that Harper wanted to lose the vote is because, as analyst Laghi put it, “a same-sex defeat blunts a Liberal arrow from the campaign quiver” of the next election. Hence, Harper’s declaration after the vote that the issue is now dead or, as they say in Ottawa, the file is closed. “The result was decisive,” Harper told reporters. “I don’t see reopening this question in the future.” Because the point was obvious, Harper didn’t have to explicitly say that the opposition could no longer make it an issue in the next electoral contest. He even declined to indulge in the bad idea of a law exempting public servants from performing same-sex marriages on grounds of religious conscience.

What was odd about the mainstream reportage/commentary was that it contained a tone of blame and disappointment that Harper wasn’t really interested in reversing the same-sex marriage law. Since most of the commentators themselves wanted to “move on” and “put the issue behind us,” as people like to say these days, their disappointment was puzzling. Since they too wanted the anti-same-sex marriage motion to go down to defeat, they ought to have welcomed Harper’s willingness to do the same. Perhaps they think the punditry and reportage business would be easier if Harper really is the reactionary ogre that he’s often been portrayed as being.

I regarded Harper’s evident disinterest in reversing this bit of Canadian history as a good thing. I took it that his handling of the same-sex marriage issue was a signal that he doesn’t have the intention of pursuing a “social conservative” agenda (even with a majority) and that he is bringing his version of the Conservative Party back into the traditional spectrum of Canadian politics, and moving it away from the wingnut fantasies of the former Reform and Alliance configurations. I like the traditional Canadian political spectrum because it’s committed to a large degree of social democracy and public good, which is what makes it distinctive from the American political spectrum. It was the Reform-Alliance’s entrance onto the scene in the 1980s, with its emphasis on grim morality, religious fundamentalism, and indifference to a notion of public good, that made Canadian right-wing politics so disturbing. So, if Harper’s conservatism is focused on taxes, property, free market capitalism, military matters, and the rest of the standard conservative positions, that, if not a good thing, is at least better than the alternative. You don’t have to agree with any of those views to see that focusing on them would be a “normalization” of Conservative Party politics.

As for the tactical challenge faced by Dion in the attempted revisiting of the same sex marriage issue, that can be dealt with in a sentence or two. It was Dion’s first public test as leader and he passed it with flying colours when he immediately defined same-sex marriage as a matter of constitutional equal rights, period. He also deftly sidestepped potential pitfalls by permitting his Liberal caucus a “free vote” on the issue, thus avoiding the danger of the new leader being accused of autocracy, even though a dozen or so troglodyte Liberal MPs would oppose same-sex marriage.

Desperately Seeking Substance

Insofar as the debate was a possible matter for public reflection, the media’s reduction of it to the usual horserace treatment of politics, which was pretty much about all there was, is sad. It would have been nice if space in the public forum could have been found for at least one representative of the country’s sexual preference minority. He or she might have noted that the decision not to re-visit the gay marriage issue marked the de facto and maybe even de jure end of a more than 30-year campaign to provide equal rights to homosexuals. He or she might even have cheerily said, “Yo Canada, welcome to Post-Gay!”

There are two things on my mind in the effort to locate some substance in this obscurely-Xmas-positioned, quickly-passing event. First, I’m troubled by our inability to mark public events and processes that have come to a meaningful conclusion. My vague idea is that if we had the ability to declare such issues resolved we’d have a better idea of who we are as a society and where we are in relation to history. Second, if the vote against further wrangling on same-sex marriage is the anti-climactic conclusion of the debate about homosexuality in Canada (and I think it is), then we have to define Post-Gay.

Within living memory (if you’ve lived long enough), three or four genuinely important political-social “struggles” that emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s have, some three-and-a-half decades later, produced significant transformations in Western societies. The struggles I’m thinking about have to do with race/ethnicity, feminism, homosexuality, and the environment. Homosexuality is perhaps the social issue most conclusively settled, followed by the status of women, ethnicity, and ecology.

Yet, I’m unable to think of an instance in which anyone has stood up and said, as people do at the end of decisive wars, “We’ve done it! It’s over. The world is changed, however slightly.” Part of the problem is that no one seems to know when or how to declare victory. Since the participants are still caught up with tending the wounded or worrying about whether they’ll continue to receive grants now that it’s over, you’d think the media would make the announcement. But the media’s attention-deficit-disorder is as severe as that of the multitasking, iPod-listening, cellphone-chatting citizens whose doings they’re allegedly reporting. Instead, the change is muted, then gradually forgotten, or the former combatants lose their minds and engage in excesses modelled on the Terror of the French Revolution.

I think the partial but substantial transformation wrought by feminism provides the paradigm here. Without reprising the whole story or the statistics, I think it’s fair to say that a young woman’s possibilities in the 2000s are significantly expanded from those of a young woman in the 1950s. First, it’s possible today, if you’re a woman, to conceive of oneself as an equal citizen and person; second, there is legal equality for women inscribed throughout Canadian law; and third, public attitudes about women’s rights and opposition to sexism have shifted considerably in favour of women. There’s still plenty of sexism and existing disparities to provide a full program of political activity, but we ought to be able to recognize that a fundamental battle has been won, and though the gains might conceivably be reversed, it doesn’t look likely. I rather regret that at some point in the last couple of decades, we weren’t able to pause long enough to observe and declare that there was a victory, and that it was a pretty good thing. Even raising a glass and proposing a toast would have been preferable to the mere fizzling out into post-Post-Feminism.

The situation regarding race, ethnicity, and saving the planet are all still very much in media res and we’re obviously a long way from resolution on these matters. Canada has done surprisingly well in fashioning a multi-ethnic society. No bloodbaths, no French-style riots in the burbs. Too much tribalism perhaps, not enough constitutional patriotism. Still, a remarkably successful-so-far experiment. The same can’t be said for Canada’s portion of the planet. Although we’re going to hear a lot more about climate change, global warming, sustainable environments and sundry other catchphrases in the next election(s), I’ve yet to see anything resembling a program from New Democrats, Liberals, or Greens that will make a difference. I don’t even think much fundamental thinking about these issues has been initiated, outside of think-tank organizations like the David Suzuki Foundation and similar still-marginal outfits.

So, what is Post-Gay?

When it comes to the much simpler question of homosexuality, we’ve reached a circumstance close enough to Post-Gay to be able to ask for a definition of it.

The best way to become able to recognize Post-Gay when you see it is to begin by comparing the situation in Canada to the rest of the world. My conceptualization of Post-Gay is based on an old Marxist notion, one usually applied to economic affairs, and known as the “Law of Uneven Development.” I think the Law of Uneven Development also can be applied to cultural circumstances, such as the status of homosexuality. The idea is simple: what we find in the economic world at one and the same time are completely different ways or modes of producing things, such that feudalism, raw capitalism, social democracy, and other forms of production, all exist simultaneously and can only be explained by examining the specific historical circumstances, cultures, and power structures of particular nations. I think something similar holds for how we might think about homosexuality.

What I see, and I’m intentionally over-simplifying, is a tri-partite global situation. In various countries, which I’ll call Pre-Gay, homosexuality is still illegal, often punishable by death, and cannot be spoken of much less named. There, homosexuals remain intellectually puzzled by their own sexual passions; the subject is forbidden in public discussion; and the activity is completely proscribed by law. Yet, in all of those pre-gay places, there is a considerable amount of homosexual activity despite the peril.

In other countries — the United States is a prime example — they’re still in the midst of gay struggles. Religious denunciations of homosexuality, referenda banning gay marriage, rollbacks of sexual preference anti-discrimination laws, all jostle with gay characters on TV, commercial gay pornography, increasing and/or declining public sympathy for various gay causes. But the U.S., in the midst of a strange period of religious revivalism, to say nothing of bellicosity, is clearly still in the Gay Struggle mode. Other countries — I’m thinking of Thailand — present a more hybrid situation that combines traditional pre-gay modes with a vigorous debate among homosexuals themselves about the conceptualization of modern gay identities.

Third, there are countries like Canada, as well as various European nations, which I would describe as Post-Gay or Post-Queer. What I mean by that is that being gay is no longer a contested identity; legislation has been passed that protects gay human rights up to and including same-sex marriage; and public sentiment has clearly moved to the side of people who identify themselves as gay, if they feel the need to identify themselves in sexual terms at all. Indeed, in post-gay societies, work on self-identity tends to move in directions that make the notion of gay somewhat obsolete, as reflected in the discussions of the last decade over the use of the term “queer.” One’s sexual identification no longer requires priority in a list of identifications that may include everything from vocation to musical talents to left-handedness.

All of these modes of homosexuality exist simultaneously in the world and, using a loose notion of the Law of Uneven Development, can be traced to specific cultural histories. Post-Gay, however, is a term that makes some people in post-gay societies, particularly those who have been involved in the history of gay struggles, uneasy. People working in gay organizations or gay-oriented businesses may worry that they’re going to be done out of a job or a program of activism by success. But I don’t think that’s the case, even if we recognize a notion of Post-Gay.

First, it really is important to know when to declare victory, or else one tediously lives in a past that no longer exists, or worse, persists in a tribalism that is already all too prevalent in the world. Second, the Law of Uneven Development applies not only to entire cultures, but operates differentially within countries. So, while Post-Gay clearly obtains in places like Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal, in various other specific communities and provinces, the issue of being gay or queer remains problematic, and “coming out” is still a major personal event.

Third, and finally, the condition of Post-Gay doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to do. Post-Gay doesn’t mean, as many wrongly assume, the End of Gay. Athough gay politics becomes less vital, crimes like gaybashing continue to occur; anti-gay organizations such as the U.S.-based Canadian branch of Focus on the Family continue to press for repeal of rights; and the plight of various individuals, such as teenagers in regressive school board districts, is an abiding concern. Furthermore, having achieved a Post-Gay condition doesn’t mean it can’t be reversed.

And one more practical point: given that homosexuality looks like a more or less permanent minority preference, in which there are ongoing concerns about finding like-minded or like-desiring people (the ubiquitous Internet notwithstanding), or finding support in the development of one’s own identity, whether as a teenager or as an adult in particular communities, all of that ensures there is no End of Gay in Post-Gay. There’s still space for vigilant organizations, vigorous lobbies, and even the annual parade. So, no sleeping on the last watch of the night. Although the Love that dare not speak its name, as Oscar Wilde meant it, is perhaps relegated to history, the Love that just won’t shut up, as we jokingly dare to describe it today, will continue to be heard, but at lower volumes.

Some of this should have been said at the time that parliament concluded the gay debate a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t. However belatedly, then, consider it said now.

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Vancouver, Dec. 21, 2006